Wishes For Your Career
Wishes For Your Career
Here’s the question I’m hoping one of my three kids will ask me someday: “What makes for a great career?” Not a likely question, but I’m working on my answer, just in case. Here’s what I wish for them, and for you, too:
I wish for you that you go to work at a place where they’re glad to have you, one where they’re busy enough to need the help, a place happy-busy with success, not grim-busy with suspicions and worries. A place where they wonder how to keep up with business, not where to stalk it.
And I wish for you that before too long you get chosen for a big assignment. Someone singles you out and says, “This might not work, a long-shot, but I think it has the best chance if you’re involved.” Most of your co-workers tell you not to take on the project, calling it doomed, but others urge you on, and you realize that it’s the people you respect most who are saying to go for it, and so you do. But it doesn’t go well, looking like a failure, and you’re about to quit when you say, “There’s one more thing I want to try,” and that’s the one that works.
I wish for you that you have the privilege of being scared. That someone gives you a promotion or new job, and you say to your spouse — the terrifically supportive one that I wish for you — “I don’t think I’m ready,” and your spouse says: “Well, they picked you, so they think you’re ready. And I do, too, because you’re the best.”
But I also wish for you that somewhere along the way you get fired. You push an idea too hard, and a VP from L.A. who’s jealous of your experimentation and your popularity decides to put you in your place and gets you axed. Then someone you used to work with calls you and offers you an even better job and a year later you run into that VP at a conference and sincerely say, “Thank you.”
I wish for you that you get to hire extraordinary people, some of whom are ones who don’t look or act the part, and your co-workers wonder if you know what you’re doing. And those oddball employees understand that you gave them a break, and they wonder how they can ever pay you back even as they are doing so. And you hire friends’ kids for summer jobs, and when they’re asked how you were to work with, they smile and say, “Cool.”
I wish for you that when business goes down and the slope slips, you don’t. An employee comes to you and says, “These numbers look awful, but we could fudge a little right here on this line, and forget to report this account, and then they’d look OK.” And you give them the tight smile and the hard eye and say, “No, we’ll either figure it out or tough it out,” and your employee looks at you with relief and admiration and says, “I was hoping that was what you’d say.”
And I wish for you that you are so good at what you do that it doesn’t need to be all you do. That one day when the boss wants you to give up a vacation to work on planning to plan, you can say “Sorry” and not be, and not be worried that you’ll get fired.
I wish that when you start to think about retiring, your co-workers are horrified and talk you out of it by coming up with a plan for you to ease out, working fewer days, becoming the revered one, the person everyone looks to for wisdom.
Dale Dauten is the founder of The Innovators’ Lab. His latest book is “(Great) Employees Only: How Gifted Bosses Hire and De-Hire Their Way to Success.”
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